macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 gets us a step closer to ditching 32-bit mode for apps. In fact, you can force your Mac to run only in 64-bit mode if you aren’t afraid to pay a visit to the command line. Read on to learn how.

Apple’s Terminal app on the Mac is a great tool for diving into the command line, but it isn’t the only option available. The Mac Observer rounded up several alternatives to Terminal you can use to flex your macOS command line muscles.

Apple’s macOS High Sierra introduced enough performance enhancements that my dual-core, 2011 MacBook Air felt like it had new life breathed into it. Occasionally, though – and more and more frequently recently – events would cascade such that my CPU would run at full tilt for 5-10 minutes before finally settling in. When that was happening, Activity Monitor and/or iStat Menus would show two system processes chewing up CPU: tailspind and spindump. Thankfully, we now know how to stop that.

It gives anyone with physical access to your Mac immediate and easy root privileges, meaning access to everything on your Mac. Fortunately, there’s a fix you can do yourself until Apple fixes this mess.

If you’ve never heard of the “grep” Terminal command, then you have to come check out today’s Quick Tip. Using this is a simple way to find lines in a text file that match a pattern you specify, which can make separating and cleaning up data a breeze!

It doesn’t matter if you’re a command line cowboy or a total newbie to Terminal. There’s an awesome tool called XikiHub looking for funding on Kickstarter. The founder of XikiHub says it is the social command line, and the project looks really cool. It’s based on Xiki, a command line platform. XikiHub will give you a friendlier and more powerful Terminal. What’s more, the platform will get even better over time. Users can contribute commands for high-level interfaces like git and changing the desktop background. XikiHub will also support repeating recent commands and searching the community for help to remember which commands do what. This social repository for commands is also open source. The developer uses a multi-pronged security approach, and will have a low tolerance for abuse, spam, or social media marketing. This will be one of my rare backings on Kickstarter. Hopefully, you’ll back it, too.

As powerful as the graphical user interface is on macOS, there’s still a lot more you can do from the Terminal. Whether it’s turning on repeating keys or hiding a folder from prying eyes, the Terminal holds a lot of potential. Jeff Butts walks us through his favorite five tips and tricks for using the Terminal to unleash more of the power of your Mac.

Under macOS Sierra 10.12.4, you know have limited support for an APFS drive. You won’t find the option to create one in Disk Utility, but Jeff Butts is here to demonstrate how to get the APFS drive created and mounted using Terminal and the diskutil command.

Have a webpage you use all the time? Why not make that its own, separate app? Need to create Symbolic Links (symlinks) but don’t want to use the Terminal? How about if you want to get an equipment warranty for that new Synology NAS you just bought? That’s just a sampling of the things you’ll learn in the first segment of this week’s episode. There’s more, folks. Lots more! Press play and enjoy!

Mac Geek Gab listener Michael needs help with a stubborn file he can’t delete from his macOS Trash. John F. Braun walks him through several options for dealing with recalcitrant files, including Terminal commands and utilities.

Recovering files from a failing hard drive is stressful and it can be pretty expensive, too. Reliable backups can help with the stress part, and ddrescue can help with the rest because it’s good at recovering files, and it’s free. The catch is that it requires a little command line mojo, but we’ve got you covered. Follow along to learn how to install and use ddrescue, plus we’ll show you how to give it a graphic interface, too.

Everyone got AirPods except you? No worries, Dave and John have you covered with some AirPods alternatives. Otherwise it’s listener questions dominate the show, as usual, with topics ranging from where to store your iTunes Media, network topology, replacements for Dropbox’s missing Public folder and much more. Download today and enjoy!

Sonos and Amazon jointly announced their Alexa integration earlier this year and the world rejoiced. Voice control of your Sonos system is one of those holy grails. The integration is expected to be available at some point in 2017. But I’m an impatient geek so, while I’m waiting for official support to be available, I spent an hour yesterday getting this working using freely-available open-source tools. You can do this, too, and I’ll walk you through what you’re doing and how to get started.

Mac Geek Gab listener Daryn is interested in seeing the size of both files and folders when using the Terminal. We’ll help him utilize the ‘du’ command to glean that information, and then we’ll talk about how to do that in Recovery Mode where ‘du’ isn’t readily available.